Read on Twitter
Farewell Evangelicalism https://mrsglw.wordpress.com/2021/01/16/farewell-evangelicalism/
Back in 2016, I attended the Evangelical Alliance’s 170-year anniversary the same week as Trump was elected. I sat through the celebrations and back-patting about how brilliant they were and awaited the moment when someone would address the elephant in the room.
Trump’s election and what it meant for UK evangelicalism when it was white US evangelicals who voted him in.
As the speakers spoke about the split between US and UK evangelicals almost 200 years previously over American Christian support of slavery, I awaited someone making a parallel about Trump voters vs UK evangelicals. But it didn’t come.
The Spirit of God stirred in me, as it stirs in me now, and I wrote THIS ( https://mrsglw.wordpress.com/2016/11/11/wake-up/) blog expressing my deep concerns at the Evangelical Alliance’s position. At the time, I refused to leave evangelicalism.
It is was the faith of my childhood, the faith of my healing. But over the four years since then, things have changed.
There was no road to Damascus revelation accompanied by a “Farewell Evangelicalism” blog, but everyday faith with Jesus left me drifting away from Evangelicalism.
I am a white, working-class woman (married to a man) and since 2016 I stopped feeling at home with the “evangelical” label. I can’t imagine how much more painful this has been for black people or LGBT people.
Over the last four years, the Evangelical Alliance has studiously ignored Trump, while objecting ( https://www.eauk.org/resources/what-we-offer/reports/reviewing-the-discourse-of-spiritual-abuse) to a strong definition of “spiritual abuse” because (among other things) it might mean that Christians can’t express non-affirming views about LGBT…
…sexuality without being seen as spiritually abusive. Their One People initiative attempts to promote racial justice, but with all the key people not involved in that project being white and nearly exclusive male, it seems rather tokenistic.
Particularly when you remain silent about the racism and bigotry of your brothers and sisters in the US.
Then came the beginning of 2020, which Premier Christianity declared on its front cover as The Year of Evangelism.
It’s first line declared “Jesus is going to headline London’s O2 Arena this year.” What they meant was that Franklin Graham was doing a UK evangelistic stadium tour.
Yes, that very same Franklin Graham that THIS WEEK ( https://guce.huffingtonpost.co.uk/copyConsent?sessionId=3_cc-session_a4d7b4c4-6125-4225-822f-4addf0580a0d&lang=en-gb) likened Trump to Jesus and Speaker Pelosi to Judas Iscariot for impeaching Trump after he orchestrated a coup.
In January 2020, Evangelical Alliance Director, Peter Lynas, wrote an entire article ( https://www.eauk.org/news-and-views/the-curious-case-of-franklin-free-speech-and-the-venue-police) about how efforts to ban the Franklin Graham tour were an attack on free speech, choosing to “two side” Franklin Graham, “Some see him as a bold prophetic voice,…
…others see his political views as divisive and unhelpful.”
Well, free speech or not, COVID-19 put paid to the 2020 stadium tour, which does beg the question that if Jesus was planning to headline the O2 in 2020, why he didn’t give the tour planners a bit of a heads up.
And 2020 grew tumultuously, culminating exactly four years after the 2016 Evangelical Alliance anniversary event in Joe Biden and (excitingly) Kamala Harris being elected to the White House.
Trump spent four years giving evangelical Christians the power they desperately wanted (it turns out the Holy Spirit’s power isn’t enough). In 2019 there was THAT ( https://andyrowell.net/andy_rowell/2019/12/list-of-worship-leaders-gathering-at-the-white-house-on-friday-dec-6-2019.html) photo of all the famous worship leaders praying for Trump.
Sean Feucht (joined at times by Michael W Smith and Mike Pence) becoming known as a COVID-19 super spreader for his large worship gatherings. To such a degree that he proudly sells ( https://www.seanfeucht.com/merch/p/jesus-christ-superspreader) a “Jesus Christ Super Spreader” t-shirt on his website.
Bethel church leaders, known for the many songs UK evangelicals like to sing, prophesying (along with many others) that Trump would win the election, with Bethal co-founder Beni Johnson inciting ( https://eu.redding.com/story/news/local/2020/11/10/bethel-pastor-prophesied-trump-win-facebook-video-apology-removed/6236113002/) her followers to defy democracy after Biden and Harris…
…won.
The Evangelical Alliance’s silence has been deafening over the last four years.
They’ve managed to pull out all the theological stops to object to Christian safeguarding charity, ThirtyOne:Eight’s call for spiritual abuse to be defined and responded to, but they couldn’t speak out about the evil of American evangelicalism.
Back in 2016, I thought evangelicalism was a Thing worth fighting for. Something to audaciously cling to, refusing to have it stolen by bigots and racists. But it turned out, the Evangelical Alliance didn’t agree.
Then in January 2021, after Trump had orchestrated a coup and been voted out, Evangelical Alliance CEO Gav Calver (whose father was Evangelical Alliance CEO years previously) was published in the Times declaring ( https://twitter.com/GavCalver/status/1350351758611066880?s=20) that now Trump is out of office he can…
…“more confidently introduce myself, without fear of misunderstanding or connection to US politics: ‘Hi, I’m Gavin, I’m an evangelical Christian.’” Four years previously, Gav stood on a platform celebrating the 170 years of the Evangelical Alliance, in the week Trump got…
…elected by US evangelicals and remained silent about it. As did most other UK evangelical leaders. Many of whom were delighted about the Franklin Graham stadium tour.
Unfortunately, this isn’t how culture works. Evangelicalism has become a toxic term, because leading evangelicals (and the Evangelical Alliance as a whole) have either supported Trump or remained silent.
In the public consciousness (both in the US and the UK), “evangelical” means Trump voter.
And to write an article so long after the horse has bolted, the children have been locked in cages, the pussies have been grabbed and democracy has been so thoroughly attacked (Gav says it was written in November 2020) to educate Times readers on what evangelicalism is really…
…too little, far too late.
Four years on and I no longer feel a need to fight for the label evangelical, its leaders are not my leaders. They’ve not really been leading much for quite a while now.
It turns out I can simply be a Christian, without clinging to an institution or an identity that thinks it can be rehabilitated without repentance, but simply with a whitewash ushered in by the end of Donald Trump’s presidency. Lord, have mercy.
This thread can be read here: https://mrsglw.wordpress.com/2021/01/16/farewell-evangelicalism/
